It’s nothing new that most people don’t know their hindquarters from their elbow when it comes to civic affairs.
You see surveys all the time about the percentage of people, including college students, who don’t know which came first, World War I or World War II, but here’s one of those surveys with a novel twist: It breaks out people who have held elected public office, and guess what: Those people know even less than the rest of us about history, government and economics.
Admitted, the sample was not very large. It consisted of 2,508 American adults polled by telephone, of whom 164 identified themselves as having held an elected government office at least once in their lives.
Not a big number. And those people are not necessarily senators. They might have been a justice of the peace 20 years ago, or a town board member in East Podunk, we don’t know.
But even so. Think about it: Their average score on the “civic literacy test” administered by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute was a laughable 44 percent, compared with a not too much better 49 percent for people who have not held elected office. (We don’t know if Sarah Palin was among those surveyed and if she might have pulled down the average.)
How difficult were the questions? Well, you can read them for yourself by clicking HERE.
They were multiple choice, with five possible answers supplied for each.
One asked for the inalienable rights referred to in the Declaration of Independence (like, for example, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)
One asked for the three branches of government (slightly less than half the respondents got that right.)
One asked about Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
One asked the meaning of “business profit.”
One asked for a policy tool of the Federal Reserve. (I guessed self-immolation and failed that one.)
And so on. Thirty-three questions in all. Most of them easy and obvious for anyone who stayed awake during eighth grade social studies, a few of them tricky, a couple obscure (the economics questions, for me).
But really, to score less than 50 percent you would have to have spent your life sitting in front of a television watching reality shows and ball games – which, come to think of it, some people probably have.
And don’t forget, this great country of ours being as free as it is, those people are eligible to vote, and not just vote but hold office. Yes, people who don’t know what the Electoral College is, who don’t know what Roe vs. Wade did, who don’t know what the Scopes “Monkey Trial” was about, who don’t know what countries we fought against in World War II, who don’t know who the commander in chief of the U.S. military is.
Today being Thanksgiving, let us give thanks that we live in a country as open as ours, where anyone can aspire to be president, whether he knows which branch of government the president belongs to or not.
Where many voters, as we observed in the recent go-around, actually pride themselves on their ordinariness, let’s call it, and jeer at people who might know more than they do for being members of some horrible elite.
In a genuine elitist country those people would be barred from public affairs, but not in the United States, praise be to the Founding Fathers (whose names have slipped my mind).
